Analyses of God beliefs, atheism, religion, faith, miracles, evidence for religious claims, evil and God, arguments for and against God, atheism, agnosticism, the role of religion in society, and related issues.

Friday, December 28, 2007

Suppose that through some series of quirks and kludgey combinations of features, evolution left the human organism with a set of cognitive flaws that some religious ideas exploit. Suppose that evolution left us with predispositions towards spiritual/supernatural explanations for phenomena where the natural cause isn’t immediately obvious. Imagine that it gave us a powerful set of tools for problem solving in many practical circumstances—gathering food, evading threats, finding and building shelter. But the limited scope of those tools makes it very hard for us to ponder very large systems of causes and effects, or think in terms of processes that endure for millions of years. Maybe that feeling that lots of people get when they try to imagine events receding back into history forever is a by-product of this aspect of the way our minds developed. It just seems so wrong, so counter-intuitive to so many people that there could be no first cause. It just doesn’t feel right that the world could be just physical matter with no higher being.

We have other neurological glitches that could give us some insight here.Claustrophobia affects a significant portion of the population.It could be part of the outcome of our evolution.Lots of people have an obsessive/compulsive disorder—no matter how many times they wash their hands, it still doesn’t feel like they are clean.Or they keep checking and rechecking all the locks on all the doors before they can leave the house.Something keeps nagging at the backs of their minds, no matter how carefully they try to reason through it.

So let’s entertain the hypothetical that part of the legacy that evolution left us with is a strong disposition towards religiousness. It feels like there’s a presence there listening to our innermost thoughts.It seems like some greater power is watching over us.No matter what the empirical evidence is right in front of us, we just can’t shake the feeling that there’s got to be a God up there.

One would expect, in general, that if an evolutionary process produces social creatures with sophisticated cognitive and communication skills, then a culture will spring up around them.And as that culture varies over time and different ideas, institutions, and concepts are explored, the aspects of culture that fit well with the creatures’ cognitive abilities and impairments will stick.Some ideas or patterns of information will get traction in the minds of those beings and spread through time and space. (Bans on birth control, evangelism, and pressure for large families are great ways for a set of religious ideas like Catholicism or Mormonism to rapidly spread across a population.For a very sharp blog entry about religious memes see:http://www.daylightatheism.org/2006/10/infectious-memes.html )We might expect that something like religion would develop.No matter how we are cognitively configured, with enough time and enough variations on theme, human social institutions will probably stumble upon some ideas, themes, or patterns of information that will exploit whatever flaws or weaknesses there are in the human mind.It would not be surprising to find a secondary evolution of culture that produces institutions and ideas that have a powerful and deep hold on the hearts and minds of the creatures.Gambling seems to work kind of like this.The Gambler’s Fallacy is such a powerful and seductive idea that lots of people just can’t be talked out of it.

Now if religious ideas functioned like a mind virus, and you were fortunate enough to be in an era of history where we had begun to figure out what’s really going on with belief in God, how would you want to react?How would you want to spend your 74.5 years of life in the evolutionary saga?What relationship would you want to have to this set of parasitic ideas?Would you be happy to subjugate yourself to them as billions of other humans have done?Would you be content to let so many people around you continued to be hijacked?Even if this set of ideas were symbiotic in many ways and provided some emotional, psychological, or social benefits while being propagated to each new generation of humans, would you want to sustain them in your head, or would you want them out now that you know their origin?

Now we’re really turning the believer’s classic picture of the world on its head. We’re trying to propagate the atheism meme so its spreads through the population to supplant the religious ones. They say that you’re corrupted by sin when doubts about God creep in and threaten to destroy your faith. The priests, rabbis, preachers, and evangelical believers want you to surround yourself with believers, to only read their religious texts, and to purge all non-religious thoughts and activities from your life. That’s all necessary to optimize the growing conditions for the parasite in the Petri dish of your mind. If it’s dark, ignorant, intolerant, and fearful in there, it’ll take over and infect your children, your neighbors, and your politicians (shit, it’s too late already!) But it’s not really your corrupt nature and sin that’s keeping you from unity with God, it’s seductive religious ideas that have been selected through cultural evolution for maximal effectiveness, or rather, maximal infectiousness. The religious ideas would co-opt your ability to employ your powers of reason, they encourage you to doubt your own abilities. They have wound their way so deeply into the minds of its hosts, they can no longer even imagine life without believing. Imagine that those billions of years of evolution produced this human organism with so much potential to do so many remarkable things, but the vulnerability of their minds to religious infections derailed them and took over the whole race. The real sin would be to recognize what’s going on and to not say anything. The best thing you could do for humanity would be to try to reason them back to intellectual liberation.

20 comments:

Have you read http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt07/haidt07_index.html MORAL PSYCHOLOGY AND THE MISUNDERSTANDING OF RELIGIONBy Jonathan Haidt? He argues "Yet even if belief in gods was initially a byproduct, as long as such beliefs had consequences for behavior then it seems likely that natural selection operated upon phenotypic variation and favored the success of individuals and groups that found ways (genetic or cultural or both) to use these gods to their advantage, for example as commitment devices that enhanced cooperation, trust, and mutual aid." So while "belief in supernatural entities may indeed be an accidental output of cognitive systems that otherwise do a good job of identifying objects and agents", that isn't the whole story. The rest of the story is that evolutionary group selection has probably been favoring religious beliefs.

>"Bans on birth control, evangelism, and pressure for large families are great ways for a set of religious ideas like Catholicism or Mormonism to rapidly spread across a population"

Don't know why you threw Catholicism in here. The Catholic Church opposes only artificial birth control. Natural birth control is fine and aceptable. There are numerous systems for natural birth control and family planning available to Catholics.

Catholicism is also not known for its evangelism. Catholic youth do not have missionary periods. Most Catholics have little idea how to engage a non-believer.

Also, there is no pressure for Catholics to have large families. Large Catholic families were the result of economic pressure from an agricultural based society versus religious pressure. Current research shows that "White Protestants have 1.91 lifetime births, while white Catholics have 1.64 lifetime births, Jews 1.54, and women with no religious affiliation 1.12". [http://www.popline.org/docs/0979/077988.html]

While the myth sounds good, the facts are much different.

"I could not understand why these romancers never took the trouble to find out a few elementary facts about the thing they denounced. The facts might easily have helped the denunciation, where the fictions discredited it. There were any number of real Catholic doctrines I should then have thought disgraceful to the Church . . . But the enemies of the Church never found these real rocks of offence. They never looked for them. They never looked for anything . . . Boundless freedom reigned; it was not treated as if it were a question of fact at all . . . It puzzled me very much, even at that early stage, to imagine why people bringing controversial charges against a powerful and prominent institution should thus neglect to test their own case, and should draw in this random way on their own imagination . . . I never dreamed that the Roman religion was true; but I knew that its accusers, for some reason or other, were curiously inaccurate." (G.K. Chesterton, The Catholic Church and Conversion, NY: Macmillan, 1926, 36-38)

Natural birth control? You mean BC that doesn't really work? Pulling out before letting the spunk fly? Thanks Pope, not only are the huge catholic populations of the third world naturally "pulling out" large families and contributing to global overpopulation, but also spreading the AIDS virus.

You dirty "healthy" catholics!

Please, Timothy, perhaps your propaganda should consider global populations as well...wait, then it wouldn't be propaganda.

I can't help but think of smoking. Honestly, you can't not know at this point that it's harmful yet new smokers appear every year. With a culture that mostly vilifies such activity, it still exists. Now compare that to religious belief which only a minority accept as something detrimental like a mind virus and a huge cultural support and respect for. It's necessary of course to educate and try to help the masses, but it's a big job with a lot of odds against us and seeing how even with the odds in your favor it's difficult to dissuade people from smoking, to dissuade people from religious submission seems very daunting.

Thanks for the link to Haidt, Explicit Atheist. I'm going to check into him--looks like he's making a very similar argument.

Phillychief: Great point about smoking. Another analogy might be how feminists are often in the unfortunate position of having to argue that women who have had their consciousness co-opted and corrupted by misogynistic perspectives like fundamentalist Christianity or Islam actually don't know what's good for themselves. Many of these women will insist that it is their own free choice to wear a burka, accept sharia law, or be banned from speaking in church because God has created them as inferior. Feminists and atheists then struggle between promoting women's autonomy and freedom and trying to convince them to no squander their freedom and potential by accepting such oppressive ideas.

Believers will object to the smoking metaphor because they will insist that religious belief just isn't harmful to people like that.

I confess I'm not too optimistic about winning that debate. We'd be better off taking a different tack.

Then what about alcohol. There are both benefits and hazards to alcohol use, so in that respect it matches the argument of whether or not religion is good for you; however, it is understood that there is a time and a place for it. Example - driving. Likewise, when thinking under the influence of religion in cases like abstinence programs, denying sex education, birth control and contraceptives, denying homosexuals equal rights, denying your child medical care or potentially life saving vaccines for example, it's no different than when people drive while intoxicated. Indeed, just one prayer = impairment. ;)

The alcohol analogy is another great point, Phillychief. It's more apt. Ironically, I'm really liberal about alcohol use, recreational drug use, and people's engaging in harmful and wreckless activities. That's their business, and unless they are endangering or hurting others, the government has no business restricting them.

Similarly, I would never suggest legally restricting people's pursuit of religion. But I have other worries about its effects because of some disanalogies. Religious culture actively seeks to indoctrinate people as early as possible, when they are children, when their abilities to reason and form ideas about what's true, evidence, and justification are most vulnerable. Also the vast majority of people on the planet have been co-opted by religious memes. And with religious ideas, no one really sobers up the next morning after a hard night of indulging. That shit gets into people's heads and it stays there. It corrupts their entire capacity to form accurate ideas about the world. And the religious memes themselves have features that encourage their own protection, propagation, and preservation. It's pretty transparent when a drunk tries to rationalize his drinking by arguing that it's not really bad for you, or that he's different because he really can drive drunk safely. But when so many people offer those rationalizations for religion, and we've all gotten so complacent and accepting about those flimsy excuses, there's a more serious and deep problem. Interesting: I'm starting to think now that there's a case to be made for religiousness being worse than drinking or doing drugs.

There's some strange vague ground being covered. I just want to make a couple points toward clarity.

The greatest misunderstanding regarding religion seems to be an understanding of what it actually is. There are eight characteristics generally agreed to differentiate religions from non-religions. Unfortunately, not all belief systems that self-identity as religions meet all these characteristics, while many self-identified non-religions meet many or even all of the criteria. At best, religion is a vague syndrome. At worst, the concept of a religion is a rhetorical affectation with disproportionate ramifications. Talking about "religion" as a group trait (as Haidt does) that has survived an evolutionary process takes little notice of the vast discrepancies between religions, ignores the stunning frequency with which religions seem to emerge and then die off, and pays little heed to what exactly is and what exactly isn't a religion. This is complicated even further by the problem of characterizing a system as a trait, especially when those systems are themselves are evolving. Is 5th century Christianity the same trait (or organ for that matter) as 21st century Christianity, and what does it mean that 21st century Christians have more in common with 21st century atheists than with 5th century Christians? There doesn't seem to me to be a lot of evidence that religions survive longer than a few decades and are fairly regionalized, however rhetorically persistent they may be.

One of those often cited characteristics of religion is the belief in the supernatural. Unlike the syndrome-like nature of religion it's a far more discreet phenomenon. I think this is more precisely what Matt is aiming for? While Haidt seems to be a little confused about what religion even is.

It's worth mentioning too that many who believe in the supernatural don't see the object of their belief as supernatural. How would a brain that can't recognize something as supernatural be fulfilling an evolutionary need to believe in the supernatural?

Reference:Not a completely bad general list of the characteristics of religions - http://atheism.about.com/od/religiondefinition/p/WhatReligion.htm

This is of course conjecture, that religion is a mind virus or meme and that religion is an extremely dangerous one at that. As a conjecture it is not better or worse than the conjecture say that Jews, or Gypsies carry a harmful gene that weakens the human race, and is slowyly taking over the genome. The problem is sometimes we don't take the trouble to identify the gene, or we assume that it is only one gene and other races don't carry it, or we don't bother to prove that it is as dangerous as claimed. Is all religion the same meme or virus? Is it actually a different virus than virulent nationalism. Is fanaticism a separate virus, that religious people are slightly more suceptible to. Does soft religion lead to hard religion (Do soft drugs lead to hard drugs). So much conjecture, but so little data. If we claim to respect science, then we need tests that can identify religion (and memes} reliably, otherwise it is just a label that we can use pejoratively to our advantage. It is not science or reason. It is politics, and has some use in driving the agenda where we want it to go, but it is a belief we have not bothered to prove.

My holiday reading includes theories that the 3D universe is really just an illusion. The real universe is perhaps more like a 2D hologram. The respect we show for religions, may be more an acknowledgement that we really don't know the universe we live in, so there is not much point ridiculing others beliefs since on the holo-deck, its hard to say which illusion is closer to the underlying reality.

It has been popular to think of where we would be without religion (Neil deGrasse-Tyson essays come to mind), or what heights we could acheive if religion (or Jews) were not dragging us down. I think it is good to dream, but if the influence of religion (or the Jews in Nazi Germany) has declined significantly from its peak, then if we continue to hold it responsible for the ills of the world, we will have to exaggerate its importance and its detrimental effects to maintain the fiction.

If it is a virus, it is not one that has prevented the development of democracy or western science. So it is unlikely (in my view) to destroy them. That is not to say that some religious beliefs (or viruses) or some non-religious belief, are not dangerous. There idea that all religion arises from the same source, and is equally dangerous seems too simple to be true. I like Occam's razor, but with the caveat that we reject what is too simple to be true.

I, and most of your readers, are not in a position to do the research to add data. So we can sit on the sidelines and guess which way the data will ultimately go, and pick our heros and cheer them on. Science and philosophy as team sport, each side waiting for the its next great white hope.

My new years resolution is to stop commenting in blogs. Should I slip up, please remind me to persevere.

IN GOD I'VE FOUND EVERYTHING!Who is Jesus?HE IS JESUSWHO IS HE?IN CHEMISTRY, HE TURNED WATER TO WINE.

IN BIOLOGY, HE WAS BORN WITHOUT THENORMAL CONCEPTION;

IN PHYSICS, HE DISPROVED THE LAW OFGRAVITY WHEN HE ASCENDED INTO HEAVEN;

IN ECONOMICS, HE DISPROVED THE LAWOF DIMINISHING RETURN BY FEEDING 5000 MEN WITHTWO FISHES & 5 LOAVES OF BREAD;

IN MEDICINE, HE CURED THE SICK AND THEBLIND WITHOUT ADMINISTERING A SINGLE DOSE OF DRUGS,

IN HISTORY, HE IS THEBEGINNING AND THE END;

IN GOVERNMENT, HE SAID THAT HE SHALLBE CALLED WONDERFUL COUNSELOR, PRINCE OF PEACE;

IN RELIGION, HE SAID NO ONE COMES TOTHE FATHER EXCEPT THROUGH HIM;

SO. WHO IS HE?HE IS JESUS!

JOIN ME AND LET'S CELEBRATE HIM;HE IS WORTHY.

THE EYES BEHOLDING THIS MESSAGE SHALLNOT BEHOLD EVIL, THE HAND THAT WILLSEND THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYBODY SHALLNOT LABOR IN VAIN, AND THE MOUTH SAYING AMEN TO THISPRAYER SHALL SMILE FOREVER.REMAIN IN GOD AND SEEK HIS FACE ALWAYS.AMEN < /SPAN>

IN GOD I'VE FOUND EVERYTHING!

The Greatest Man in HistoryJesus had no servants, yet they called Him Master.Had no degree, yet they called Him Teacher.Had no medicines, yet they called Him Healer.He had no army, yet kings feared Him..He won no military battles, yet He conquered theworld.He committed no crime, yet they crucified Him.He was buried in a tomb, yet He lives today.I feel honored to serve such a Leader who loves us!If you believe in God and in JesusChrist His Son .. send this to all onyour buddy list.If not just ignore it.If you ignore it, just remember thatJesus said .'If you deny me before man, I will deny you before myFather in Heaven

I hope that all my readers will take a minute to read through the comment from "Jesus Is Lord. . . " to the Religion is a Mind Virus post. I didn't make that up. I just can't imagine a better illustration of my point that when the religious memes infect a person's mind, their autonomy and their rational functions get compromised. Does anyone doubt my point now?

Jesus is Lord: And to think many U.S. voters look to a type of person that believes as “Jesus is Lord. I too think that religion can in fact be a virus that controls the minds and thus actions of millions of people. The virus in fact can be faith—in that there is no cure for it because there is no sound reason to have it, it just grows without justification for having it. I think that as we, as a nation, are more engaged by other nations hostile to us, we will in fact turn to our leaders—with the virus—and our actions will be based on the faith/teaching of our defined supernatural entity of focus. It is clear that our present administration has basically declared war against those with a different type of virus, which in turn can lead us down a dark and destructive path. What we see every day in the news is in some way, battling viruses. (Dean)

With more globalization there probably will be more cognitive dissonance. Some may become more extreme in defence, while others may become more nebulous with their views on faith. It's a trip looking back to a time when I went to church, trying to rationalize science and the Bible in my mind.

"when the religious memes infect a person's mind, their autonomy and their rational functions get compromised. Does anyone doubt my point now?"

The problem I have with memes vs genes, is not that I don't think ideas are important, or have not shaped human history, but rather how do you know which meme is bad and likely to infect, and even more important which meme is actually present in an individual

With genes we cannot definitively say which gene is better (only better in certain conditions) but we can at least say which gene is present. So there is a test in principle one could do that would falsify the premise that "Jews uniquely, carry a dangerous gene"

We know that the same form arises often in the biological world, but that those sharing the form are not always related. That is, no genes in common are responsible for the same form. Each form evolved to exploit a niche.

I find it dangerous to infer that peoples reasoning is undermined by a supposed entity, and yet have no test to detect that entity, or test that entity to determine if it causes the effects attributed to it. Peoples reasoning can be disrupted for all kinds of reasons. Does religion infect a mind, or does a weak mind latch on to religion? Are only religious people ever mad? If not then we should not use a few mad religious people, to infer on religion, what a few mad scientists should not cause us to infer upon science.

"Suppose that through some series of quirks and kludgey combinations of features, evolution left the human organism with a set of cognitive flaws that some religious ideas exploit. "You have packed so many question-begging materialist presuppositions into this opening sentence that the steaming pile of neck bearded blather that follows is exactly what we should expect see. Apparently anyone who announces that they see "no evidence of any god(s)" is now able to prance and preen around, calling themselves a philosopher.I think the lesson to be learned here is that if you take an angst-ridden, basement dwelling teenage, jam him through a secular university system for 8 years, and award him what is basically a PhD i atheism, he will still be an angst-ridden, basement dwelling teenager.Dr. McCormick, if you believe in the existence of objective truth - indeed, if you believed in anything beyond your own solipsistic hedonism - you would immediately resign from any university position you currently hold, return all of the funds you have stolen form the taxpayers and/or students by passing off your musings as 'philosophy,' delete every entry on this website, find a quiet place, and rethink your life.

My book is out:

Search This Blog

Atheism

Author:

Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Rochester. Teaching at CSUS since 1996. My main area of research and publication now is atheism and philosophy of religion. I am also interested in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and rational decision theory/critical thinking.

Quotes:

"Science. It works, bitches."

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." - Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

"Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry for ever and ever until the end of time. But he loves you! He loves you and he needs money!"George Carlin 1937 - 2008

Many Paths, No God.

I don't go to church, I AM a church, for fuck's sake. I'm MINISTRY. --Al Jourgensen

Every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, “It is a matter of faith, and above reason.”- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

If life evolved, then there isn't anything left for God to do.

The universe is not fine-tuned for humanity. Humanity is fine-tuned to the universe. Victor Stenger

Skeptical theists choose to ride the trolley car of skepticism concerning the goods that God would know so as to undercut the evidential argument from evil. But once on that trolley car it may not be easy to prevent that skepticism from also undercutting any reasons they may suppose they have for thinking that God will provide them and the worshipful faithful with life everlasting in his presence. William Rowe

Unless you're one of those Easter-bunny vitalists who believes that personality results from some unquantifiable divine spark, there's really no alternative to the mechanistic view of human nature. Peter Watts

The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. E.O. Wilson

Creating humans who could understand the contrast between good and evil without subjecting them to eons of horrible suffering would be an utterly inconsequential matter for an omnipotent being. MM

The second commandment is "Thou shall not construct any graven images." Is this really the pinnacle of what we can achieve morally? The second most important moral principle for all the generations of humanity? It would be so easy to improve upon the 10 Commandments. How about "Try not to deep fry all of your food"? Sam Harris

Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody--not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms--had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would think--though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one--that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great

We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true--that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow. Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great

If atheism is a religion, then not playing chess is a hobby.

"Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything--anything--be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in." Sam Harris, The End of Faith, 36.

"Only a tiny fraction of corpsesfossilize, and we are lucky to have as many intermediate fossils as we do. We could easily have had no fossils at all, and still the evidence for evolution from other sources, such as molecular genetics and geographical distribution, would be overwhelmingly strong. On the other hand, evolution makes the strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in the wrong geological stratum, the theory would be blown out of the water." Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 127.

One cannot take, "believing in X gives me hope, makes me moral, or gives me comfort," to be a reason for believing X. It might make me moral if I believe that I will be shot the moment I do something immoral, but that doesn't make it possible for me to believe it, or to take its effects on me as reasons for thinking it is true. Matt McCormick

Add this blog to your Google Page

Top Ten Myths about Belief in God

1. Myth: Without God, life has no meaning.

There are 1.2 billion Chinese who have no predominant religion, and 1 billion people in India who are predominantly Hindu. And 65% of Japan's 127 million people claim to be non-believers. It is laughable to suggest that none of these billions of people are leading meaningful lives.

2. Myth: Prayer works.

Numerous studies have now shown that remote, blind, inter-cessionary prayer has no effect whatsoever of the health or well-being of subject's health, psychological states, or longevity. Furthermore, we have no evidence to support the view that people who wish fervently in their heads for things that they want get those things at any higher rate than people who do not.

3. Myth: Atheists are less decent, less moral, and overall worse people than believers.

There are hundreds of millions of non-believers on the planet living normal, decent, moral lives. They love their children, care about others, obey laws, and try to keep from doing harm to others just like everyone else. In fact, in predominately non-believing countries such as in northern Europe, measures of societal health such as life expectancy at birth, adult literacy, per capita income, education, homicide, suicide, gender equality, and political coercion are better than they are in believing societies.

4. Myth: Belief in God is compatible with the descriptions, explanations and products of science.

In the past, every supernatural or paranormal explanation of phenomena that humans believed turned out to be mistaken; science has always found a physical explanation that revealed that the supernatural view was a myth. Modern organisms evolved from lower life forms, they weren't created 6,000 years ago in the finished state. Fever is not caused by demon possession. Bad weather is not the wrath of angry gods. Miracle claims have turned out to be mistakes, frauds, or deceptions. So we have every reason to conclude that science will continue to undermine the superstitious worldview of religion.

5. Myth: We have immortal souls that survive the death of the body.

We have mountains of evidence that makes it clear that our consciousness, our beliefs, our desires, our thoughts all depend upon the proper functioning of our brains our nervous systems to exist. So when the brain dies, all of these things that we identify with the soul also cease to exist. Despite the fact that billions of people have lived and died on this planet, we do not have a single credible case of someone's soul, or consciousness, or personality continuing to exist despite the demise of their bodies. Allegations of spirit chandlers, psychics, ghost stories, and communications with the dead have all turned out to be frauds, deceptions, mistakes, and lies.

6. Myth: If there is no God, everything is permitted. Only belief in God makes people moral.

Consider the billions of people in China, India, and Japan above. If this claim was true, none of them would be decent moral people. So Ghandi, the Buddha, and Confucius, to name only a few were not moral people on this view, not to mention these other famous atheists: Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Aldous Huxley, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, Carl Sagan, Bertrand Russell, Elizabeth Cady-Stanton, John Stuart Mill, Galileo, George Bernard Shaw, Gloria Steinam, James Madison, John Adams, and so on.

7. Myth: Believing in God is never a root cause of significant evil.

The counter examples of cases where it was someone's belief in God that was the direct justification for their perpetrated horrendous evils on humankind are too numerous to mention.

8. Myth: The existence of God would explain the origins of the universe and humanity.

All of the questions that allegedly plague non-God attempts to explain our origins--why are we here, where are we going, what is the point of it all, why is the universe here--still apply to the faux explanation of God. The suggestion that God created everything does not make it any clearer to us where it all came from, how he created it, why he created it, where it isall going. In fact, it raises even more difficult mysteries: how did God, operating outside the confines of space, time, and natural law "create" or "build" a universe that has physical laws? We have no precedent and maybe no hope of answering or understanding such a possibility. What does it mean to say that some disembodied, spiritual being who knows everything and has all power, "loves" us, or has thoughts, or goals, or plans? How could such a being have any sort of personal relationship with beings like us?

9. Myth: Even if it isn't true, there's no harm in my believing in God anyway.

People's religious views inform their voting, how they raise their children, what they think is moral and immoral, what laws and legislation they pass, who they are friends and enemies with, what companies they invest in, where they donate to charities, who they approve and disapprove of, who they are willing to kill or tolerate, what crimes they are willing to commit, and which wars they are willing to fight. How could any reasonable person think that religious beliefs are insignificant.

10: Myth: There is a God.

Common Criticisms of Atheism (and Why They’re Mistaken)

1. You can’t prove atheism.You can never prove a negative, so atheism requires as much faith as religion.

Atheists are frequently accosted with this accusation, suggesting that in order for non-belief to be reasonable, it must be founded on deductively certain grounds. Many atheists within the deductive atheology tradition have presented just those sorts of arguments, but those arguments are often ignored. But more importantly, the critic has invoked a standard of justification that almost none of our beliefs meet. If we demand that beliefs are not justified unless we have deductive proof, then all of us will have to throw out the vast majority of things we currently believe—oxygen exists, the Earth orbits the Sun, viruses cause disease, the 2008 summer Olympics were in China, and so on. The believer has invoked one set of abnormally stringent standards for the atheist while helping himself to countless beliefs of his own that cannot satisfy those standards. Deductive certainty is not required to draw a reasonable conclusion that a claim is true.

As for requiring faith, is the objection that no matter what, all positions require faith?Would that imply that one is free to just adopt any view they like?Religiousness and non-belief are on the same footing?(they aren’t).If so, then the believer can hardly criticize the non-believer for not believing. Is the objection that one should never believe anything on the basis of faith?Faith is a bad thing?That would be a surprising position for the believer to take, and, ironically, the atheist is in complete agreement.

2. The evidence shows that we should believe.

If in fact there is sufficient evidence to indicate that God exists, then a reasonable person should believe it. Surprisingly, very few people pursue this line as a criticism of atheism. But recently, modern versions of the design and cosmological arguments have been presented by believers that require serious consideration. Many atheists cite a range of reasons why they do not believe that these arguments are successful. If an atheist has reflected carefully on the best evidence presented for God’s existence and finds that evidence insufficient, then it’s implausible to fault them for irrationality, epistemic irresponsibility, or for being obviously mistaken.Given that atheists are so widely criticized, and that religious belief is so common and encouraged uncritically, the chances are good that any given atheist has reflected more carefully about the evidence.

3. You should have faith.

Appeals to faith also should not be construed as having prescriptive force the way appeals to evidence or arguments do. The general view is that when a person grasps that an argument is sound, that imposes an epistemic obligation of sorts on her to accept the conclusion. One person’s faith that God exists does not have this sort of inter-subjective implication. Failing to believe what is clearly supported by the evidence is ordinarily irrational. Failure to have faith that some claim is true is not similarly culpable. At the very least, having faith, where that means believing despite a lack of evidence or despite contrary evidence is highly suspect. Having faith is the questionable practice, not failing to have it.

4. Atheism is bleak, nihilistic, amoral, dehumanizing, or depressing.

These accusations have been dealt with countless times. But let’s suppose that they are correct. Would they be reasons to reject the truth of atheism? They might be unpleasant affects, but having negative emotions about a claim doesn’t provide us with any evidence that it is false. Imagine upon hearing news about the Americans dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki someone steadfastly refused to believe it because it was bleak, nihilistic, amoral, dehumanizing, or depressing. Suppose we refused to believe that there is an AIDS epidemic that is killing hundreds of thousands of people in Africa on the same grounds.

5.Atheism is bad for you.Some studies in recent years have suggested that people who regularly attend church, pray, and participate in religious activities are happier, live longer, have better health, and less depression.

First, these results and the methodologies that produced them have been thoroughly criticized by experts in the field.Second, it would be foolish to conclude that even if these claims about quality of life were true, that somehow shows that there is theism is correct and atheism is mistaken.What would follow, perhaps, is that participating in social events like those in religious practices are good for you, nothing more.There are a number of obvious natural explanations.Third, it is difficult to know the direction of the causal arrow in these cases.Does being religious result in these positive effects, or are people who are happier, healthier, and not depressed more inclined to participate in religions for some other reasons?Fourth, in a number of studies atheistic societies like those in northern Europe scored higher on a wide range of society health measures than religious societies.

Given that atheists make up a tiny proportion of the world’s population, and that religious governments and ideals have held sway globally for thousands of years, believers will certainly lose in a contest over “who has done more harm,” or “which ideology has caused more human suffering.”It has not been atheism because atheists have been widely persecuted, tortured, and killed for centuries nearly to the point of extinction.

Sam Harris has argued that the problem with these regimes has been that they became too much like religions.“Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag, and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.”

7.Atheists are harsh, intolerant, and hateful of religion.

Sam Harris has advocated something he calls “conversational intolerance.”For too long, a confusion about religious tolerance has led people to look the other way and say nothing while people with dangerous religious agendas have undermined science, the public good, and the progress of the human race.There is no doubt that people are entitled to read what they choose, write and speak freely, and pursue the religions of their choice.But that entitlement does not guarantee that the rest of us must remain silent or not verbally criticize or object to their ideas and their practices, especially when they affect all of us.Religious beliefs have a direct affect on who a person votes for, what wars they fight, who they elect to the school board, what laws they pass, who they drop bombs on, what research they fund (and don’t), which social programs they fund (and don’t), and a long list of other vital, public matters.Atheists are under no obligation to remain silent about those beliefs and practices that urgently need to be brought into the light and reasonably evaluated.

Real respect for humanity will not be found by indulging your neighbor’s foolishness, or overlooking dangerous mistakes.Real respect is found in disagreement.The most important thing we can do for each other is disagree vigorously and thoughtfully so that we can all get closer to the truth.

8.Science is as much a religious ideology as religion is.

At their cores, religions and science have a profound difference.The essence of religion is sustaining belief in the face of doubts, obeying authority, and conforming to a fixed set of doctrines.By contrast, the most important discovery that humans have ever made is the scientific method.The essence of that method is diametrically opposed to religious ideals:actively seek out disconfirming evidence.The cardinal virtues of the scientific approach are to doubt, analyze, critique, be skeptical, and always be prepared to draw a different conclusion if the evidence demands it.